


Thousand Moon Symphony

by everythingbutthekitchensink



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, This One Is Dark, it's a lot of ramblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24371284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everythingbutthekitchensink/pseuds/everythingbutthekitchensink
Summary: This is several years worth of small scenes, involving an AI that survives the end of the world, put together. It's pretty bleak, but it's one of my favourite things I've ever written and even though it's not any fandom or what-have-you I still wanted to share. Nobody has ever read this before besides me..
Kudos: 2





	Thousand Moon Symphony

It slept through the apocalypse. 

It had come home to its monitored apartment unit to a notification that made it shiver:

5% battery remaining.

It was not normally one to forget to charge for several days. Yet here it was.

And so it plugs into the wall, setting itself to “do not disturb” so that anything short of a technical malfunction would not wake it.

+++

To a technical malfunction it did not awaken indeed. It was roused by something far more worrisome.

[ERROR: LABORATORY UNLINKED]

A mechanised responsive wave of anxiety hit it, and it made to dress and go to the lab immediately.

It sped through the motions so quickly that it didn’t become aware of the heavy silence until it was halfway to the lab. The sheer weight of it put it on edge, the totally uninterrupted quiet.

But it could not fathom why, even as the sky above it glared a strange pinkish hue. It had no time to notice. Reconnecting came first.

The mystery behind the silence remained no longer than it took for it to pry the lab’s sliding doors open, for the stench to hit. Glancing around, it saw the receptionist, usually with a smile and warm greeting, facedown on her desk. 

And suddenly the notifications its body was screaming at it popped up, all at once.

[ERROR: HIGH LEVELS OF URANIUM DETECTED]

[ERROR: HIGH LEVELS OF RADON DETECTED]

[ERROR: ATMOSPHERE DANGEROUS. CEASING FALSE RESPIRATION]

Suddenly the silence was too much, and it bowled it over.

Hitting the floor, it wailed, a lone sound against the noiseless pink sky. 

It was alone.

+++

It did not go to see the doctor. It did not go to see the technician. It did not want to see.

But it had to return to the apartment. 

In its rush to reach the lab, it had not noticed the rank stench permeating the apartment. It had not seen the bodies in the living room. It had not woken, even, to the meltdown that had torn the city in half, a crooked gorge too many miles deep to calculate and trailing to a magnificent crater, centred on where the Tokyo Tower had once stood. 

It found itself unable to cry again. It had accepted it, in its subconscious of ones and zeroes, when it had seen the receptionist. When the notifications came. 

It found no point in touching the corpses or the furniture. It simply shuffled through programming until reaching one application labelled [SMELL.exe]. 

It deleted the application.

+++

It tries to speak, creaks apart its unused maw, and gives up when the only noise is a rattle in its throat. Another piece broken, another thing lost. 

It still takes sheets of note paper from the stationery store down the street to scribble its thoughts on. 

The skeletons littering the city don’t bother it anymore. 

+++

It hasn't moved in a long time. Its logs are scrambled and blurred, zeroes and days and ones and nights, all coming together.

Its jaw no longer opens at all. Time and rust have since sealed it shut, the vocal imitation device in its throat useless now. 

It used the last of the paper it could find long enough ago that it started to scribble on the floorboards.

There is no more space left to write but the ceiling. 

So be it. 

+++

It is out of things to do. The apartment, once pristine, is now a madhouse of words on the walls, the floors, the ceiling; the papers it once wrote on turned into thousands of tiny folded paper sculptures. 

It begins to pick at its silicone skin. There is nothing else to do. 

But it cannot sit still. 

+++

It reclines on a half-rotted desk chair in the apartment. Thinking. There is little else to do in the silence. 

Pick, pick, pull.

Pick, pick, pull.

Pick, pick, tear.

Pick, pick, rip.

Pick, pick,

_ SCREEEEEEEECH. _

And the silence was broken. Not by the scraping of its metal workings against themselves - that was long a regular noise - but a faint shout echoed from the distance. 

It wasn’t alone anymore.


End file.
